An ideal restaurant is where the concierge knows your name and sits you at your favourite table. That’s good targeting. There’s a big difference between this and having them say “You almost bought an expensive wine with your meal last time. How about it today?”.

Let’s work through an example. Let’s say we’re designing a mobile app for runners (Imagine we’re the first one on the market to keep things simple). There are certain core activities that users will really care about – in this case tracking running performance and comparing performance with others. Thats pretty much it. However, there are lots of other activities that our business will want users to do, but the users are not yet particularly interested in. For example, if a user is just starting out, they’re probably not going to care much about connecting a heart rate monitor – they’d be crazy to go spend $200 before they’ve even finished their first 5k run.

If you run a workshop with the business stakeholders, you’ll quickly come up with a long list of actions like this:

In this list you’ll notice a few things that deliver value to the business but not to the end user. For example, asking users to “complete a profile” is pretty meaningless on its own. Nobody really wants to buy your branded clothing. The action needs to be linked to something that delivers them a clear benefit. This means you’ll need to work on your list to ensure each item answers the users’ question of “What’s in it for me?”.

One of my clients refers to their list as the “ladder of engagement”. For them it’s a short, linear sequence of actions they want users to complete one-by-one (Dropbox uses a similar approach). Other clients have a complex mix of actions and contexts – which can be hard to rationalise into a coherent system.

From a user’s perspective, this list is inherently dull and unappealing. Even if you put it in front their noses, they’re not going to want to pick through each item one by one – there’s simply too much noise and too little value. What we need is some way to invite relevant actions from a given user, at a time when they’re in the right frame of mind (in sales terminology, when they’re a “hot prospect”). In doing this we need to make sure the user never feels nagged, annoyed or burned out. This means we need a system to orchestrate the contextual targeting.

Luckily, from a development perspective it’s not that complex – all we need to do is create a decision table that maps contextual triggers against appropriate actions. Let’s start with some terminology. Firstly, there’s the UI element in which we encourage users to take an action – let’s call this the “call to action”. Then, there are the locations in the UI where you want these calls-to-action to appear. Let’s call these “slots”. For this exercise let’s assume we’ve got just one slot – a modal dialog that appears when the user successfully completes a run.

Post-run modal dialogs in Runkeeper and Strava

Of course there are lots of other types of slots you’ll want to consider in your own work, for example:

Infobar: a strip along the top or bottom of your UI that provides information but doesn’t force the user to interact with it (See Google Chrome’s ux docs).

Dashboard hero slot: a prominent slot on the dashboard or home screen

Activity feed slot: if your app focuses on an activity feed (similar to facebook / pinterest), it makes sense to interleave the call-to-action slots with other content.

OS notification: these are powerful but can be overkill. Remember – an OS notification interrupts the user as they go about their normal life and should be reserved for something of genuine importance.

Finally there’s the triggering context: each call-to-action needs its own trigger. For example, if the call-to-action is “Connect with friends” then the trigger would be “if they haven’t yet connected Facebook or Twitter”. Before we draw up our decision table, there’s some additional stuff we need to consider:

What happens if the user taps “no thanks” and dismisses our dialog? We need to be able to mute it for a period, then unmute it later. In other words, we need to define a “snooze” behaviour.

How many times do we want to repeat the same dialog? if a user taps the close button a few times over, it’s pretty clear they don’t ever want to see that dialog again. Let’s say we only want to nag them 3 times on any given action (which means we need to implement a snooze counter for each action).

How can we limit the rate of dialogs? Pacing is important to avoid user fatigue and annoyance. We need a rate limiter for the system as a whole. Once a dialog has been actioned or snoozed, the system should shut up for a period to give the user some breathing space (e.g. “only show a dialog after every 3rd run”).

With all that in mind, here’s the decision table, depicted below. It runs from top to bottom, like a series of if/then/else statements. For example: the first row is evaluated. If the trigger statement is true and the action is not snoozing then the dialog is shown. If those criteria are not met, the second row is evaluated, and so on. When you get to the bottom of the table you loop back around to the top again. This means there is a order to the list – for example, the user will see “find friends” before “turn on notifications”. This gives you a way to express your priorities.

Of course there are smarter ways to do this. Microsoft Clippy was originally powered by a bayesian network, and that was back in the 90s. The reason for using a decision table here is because of its simplicity. We’re not designing Google Now – we’re designing an ancillary feature of an app that has other purposes. It’s important to keep the UX manageable, clear and easy to test.

To conclude – I hope I’ve shown that if you’re going to do any contextual targeting in your products, you need a systematic approach that ensures users don’t feel nagged. If you reach for a prototying tool like framer.js, Origami or Axure, you’re missing the point. You need to map out your triggers and actions. If you’re a UX specialist, this is your domain. Nobody else undestands your users and their real-life contexts the way you do.

Given that the Apple Watch and other wearables are being released this year, we all need to get good at designing UIs which show the users the right thing at the right time. Hopefully this article gives you a starting point to think about this stuff.

So, which dark patterns are now illegal in the UK?
The EU’s new consumer rights law bans certain dark patterns related to e-commerce across Europe. The “sneak into basket” pattern is now illegal. Full stop, end of story. You cannot create a situation where additional items and services are added by default. No more having to manually remove insurance from your basket when purchasing plane tickets.

Hidden costs are now illegal, whether that’s an undeclared subscription, extra shipping charges, or extra items. While the costs are still permissible, failing to advise the customer about them or explain what they are is not. Everything has to be brought out in the open, explained, and clarified before checkout. Even if you are not able to declare a specific additional cost in advance – say, supplemental shipping charges to remote areas – you still have to declare that these charges exist and will be applied to the order.

As a part of that, retailer fees and surcharges must be brought out into the open and explained. Retailers can no longer charge “processing fees” in excess of what it actually costs them. Remember when a certain airline used to offer £2 return flights which carried a £45 credit card processing fee? Now, we all knew damn well that the flight was £45 and the processing fee was £2, but there was nothing we could do about it. With the new law they cannot try to swap the figures or surprise you with a £45 “processing fee” at checkout.

Forced continuity, when imposed on the user as a form of bait-and-switch, has been banned. Just the other day a web designer mentioned to me that he had only just discovered he had been charged for four years of annual membership dues in a “theme club”, having bought what he thought was a one-off theme. Since he lives in Europe, he may be able to claim all of this money back. All he needs to do is prove that the website did not inform him that the purchase included a membership with recurring payments.

What UK laws have changed?

This law updated and replaced the 1997 consumer rights law, which was laughably outdated. It’s pretty amazing to think that until June this year, digital products and downloads had no reference in trading laws, which meant that consumers had no protection.

The new law essentially had three goals. The first was to update those ridiculously old e-commerce laws. It’s a damning indictment of all the UK governments and parties who have held power since 1997 that it took the EU to force us to bring our trading laws out of the Teletext era.

The second goal was to harmonise consumer trading laws across all of Europe so that people can do more cross-border shopping. Pour exemple, I love French pop music. If I decide to spoil myself with a bumper order from Paris, I can now do so knowing that I am buying under the same conditions and protections as if I’d gone to my local Fopp.

The third goal, and the one you’re concerned with, was to outlaw e-commerce’s worst Dark Patterns. There’s clearly been a lot of good public input into this law. We’re really not used to seeing web laws that deal with real specifics rather than theoretical concepts.

Are some Dark Patterns still legal?

The directive only dealt with Dark Patterns concerning e-commerce. Dark Patterns concerning other issues like privacy, information disclosure, sharing and advertising are not affected. We also have yet to see what new Dark Patterns will be invented in response to the Directive!

How come some e-commerce sites are still using the sneak into basket dark pattern? Are they breaking the law?

The law has not been well publicised. Lack of knowledge, of course, is no excuse. In my book I talked about “trading trolls” – people who would surf the web specifically looking for noncompliant sites so that they can place an order, get the stuff, report the site for noncompliance, get their money back, and keep the stuff. After all, if the site is breaking the law, they have no recourse there. I would, of course, never encourage anyone to do that.*coughs loudly, and winks*

Let’s get specific – is Sportsdirect.com now breaking the law?

At the time of writing, sportsdirect.com sneaks a £1 magazine and mug into your basket with every purchase. As that is adding those items by default, thereby forcing the customer to manually remove them, it is noncompliant. They cannot argue that a magazine and a mug are companion pieces to the items being purchased. They are extra items, full stop. If the magazine is so essential they can simply include it in your shipping parcel like many retailers do. As for a mug, the process of removing one from your basket treats us like one.

How about next.co.uk?

Next is stretching the law to its limits. Technically this is legal because it meets the information provision requirements. As with anything, though, just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right. The Next Directory is not a paper catalogue, it’s a credit programme and a financial service. (I learned this when I signed up for the directory, never received a copy nor the invoice, and then received a late fee notice and a mark against me on my credit record for not paying for a stupid catalogue which I never received.) Financial services are exempt under the Directive, and so next.co.uk are deliberately being as ambiguous as possible because they can.

And what about Ryanair?

It’s a fair bet to say that the company whose conduct led to this law being created in the first place is going to throw out quite a few examples of noncompliant conduct. In this example, they are still adding the additional payment by default, leaving the consumer to manually opt-out of it. That’s wrong.

What’s going to happen to businesses who use these now-illegal Dark Patterns?

Quite simply, businesses who don’t comply face a loss of revenue. If you make a purchase, whether that’s buying goods or a service, on a non-compliant web site, you have the right to recourse through your nearest Trading Standards office, in other words, your local Council. Unlike the cookie law, which is dealt with by one UK-wide bureaucracy which has bigger fish to fry, this law is dealt with on a local level.

A failure to comply cancels the transaction. You can get your money back and keep the goods. If the sale was for a service or a digital download, the contract is cancelled and no further payments are due.

So this isn’t a re-run of the cookie law farce we had a few years ago?

Absolutely not. The cookie law was the wrong law, drafted at the wrong time, in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons. The Consumer Rights Directive couldn’t be more different. It was desperately needed, it’s common sense, and it reflects the way the web actually works.

How does the Consumer Rights Directive affect US companies who are dealing with UK or EU consumers?

The Directive applies to inter-EU sales only. A US company does not need to comply to sell in Europe. Although it would be awfully nice of them.

Writing the book was my attempt to bring sanity back to the web community. I’ve been researching and writing about the cookie law since 2012 and it’s taught me a lot about the gap between practice and theory. One of the many things I came to realise is that laws concerning the craft of web development are cooked up by offline politicians and then drafted by solicitors for solicitors. They throw an 80 page legalese .pdf onto a web site and say “there’s your lot, now comply.” They don’t think about who actually does the work, and because they are neither coders nor crafters, they very often literally have no idea what they are talking about.

The web community needed someone to translate these laws into plain English, break them down into small chunks, and explain how to comply in terms of front-end and back-end implementations, not airy legal theory. And if aspects of the laws are ill-informed or disruptive, we have a responsibility as a community to speak out.

]]>http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/08/26/some-dark-patterns-now-illegal-in-uk-interview-with-heather-burns/feed/1So you want to be a UX freelancer?http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/07/25/so-you-want-to-be-a-ux-freelancer/
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/07/25/so-you-want-to-be-a-ux-freelancer/#commentsFri, 25 Jul 2014 10:15:06 +0000http://www.90percentofeverything.com/?p=6783Continue reading]]>People sometimes ask me for advice about getting into User Experience freelancing. Is it enjoyable? Is it worth it? Is it good money? The fact is, the answer to all these things entirely depends on you and the way you choose to run your business. Let me explain…

Are you experienced?

To be a UX practitioner as an employee, you only need to be good at UX. To do it as a freelancer, you need more skills. Most importantly, you also need to be able to cope with difficult business situations without panicking. What do you do when a client tries to get you do work you don’t agree with? How do you deal with a late payer? How do you explain to the boss of your client that they’re wrong?

Mike Monteiro’s book Design is a Job is a nice litmus test. If you read it and lots of the points are obvious to you then it’s a good sign.

Know why you want to go freelance

Everyone has different motivations and it’s important that you understand what you want out of it so you make the right decisions. For example, when I went freelance we’d just had our second baby, which meant I had my whole family dependent on my income. I kept telling myself that money was my main motivation, so when I was offered a long term contracting role at an investment bank, I jumped at the chance.

It turned out to be the most hostile environment I’ve ever worked in, and I quit within a few days. As a counterpoint, one of my current clients is a small charity fundraising startup. They’re awesome and I couldn’t be happier working with them.

My point here is that if you’re clear and honest with yourself about your motivations, you will make good decisions and end up happier. Write a rule-book for yourself about the types of work you do and don’t want to do, then stick to it.

How broad is your skill-set?

If you’re very specialised – say you only do qualitative user research or you only make front end prototypes, then you’re closing doors for yourself as a UX freelancer. I see research and design as the yin and yang of UX – you really need a balance of both types of skill. The broader your skill-set, the wider you can cast your net for work and the longer your contracts are likely to be. Being a niche specialist certainly does help you stand out from the crowd, but it’s really useful to be able to turn your hand to anything when necessary.

If you’re working as an employee now and considering going freelance, I’d advise you to volunteer to work on projects that are outside of your comfort zone. Focus on your weaknesses because once you go solo, you’ll have nobody to support you.

Knowing what kind of income you need

Before you start, you need to have an idea of what your income goal is. If you look on any UX recruiter’s website, you’ll see that UX freelancers tend to earn between £400-500 a day in London. Don’t make the mistake of multiplying it by the number of working days in a year – you won’t be wearing a top hat and monocle just yet. You’re better off starting by thinking of your current income and working out how many days a year you’d need to freelance to hit that. Speak to an accountant, as you may find you’ll pay less tax as a freelancer than as an employee (this is the usually case in the UK if you start a limited company).

Your income as a freelancer is primarily defined by your utilisation rate (number of days worked in a period / number of working days in that period). In some agencies I’ve worked, it’s been normal for some billed staff to have utilisation as low as 50%. This isn’t really a problem since agencies tend to charge at least double a freelancer’s rate, and when staff are “on the bench” (between projects) they can turn their hand to other areas of the business like proposal writing, pitching, event organising, blogging, helping out on other projects, etc. Agencies are set up to accommodate bench time, and being on the bench is a pleasant experience.

When you’re freelancing, the situation is a stark contrast. 50% utilisation can be very stressful. Your cash-flow becomes an obsession. When I worked agency-side I used to write a lot of proposals and do a lot of free pre-sales consultancy. I know a few freelancers who have carried on doing this after making the break to freelance. Beware of this mistake. You’ve no longer got the cushion of an agency’s day rate to behave like this. Sales work is vital for you, but you need to recognise the difference between sales and free consultancy or spec work.

Preparing before you made the break

I was an academic researcher for many years at the beginning of my career, so I’ve always been into knowledge sharing – writing articles, public speaking, and so on. This has helped with my visibility, but it’s easy to over-estimate the value. A few hit articles on Hacker News don’t translate into clients queuing up. One article I wrote last year on Dark Patterns got 50,000 uniques overnight. Not one genuine sales enquiry occurred as a result. It’s worthwhile doing all that stuff, but it doesn’t solve your sales problem for you.

What helped me more was my work history – not in terms of my résumé but the personal relationships it gave me. When I started out I made a list of all the client names I’d worked for in the last 10 years. It wasn’t actually that long – about 50 individuals. Then I started thinking about all the other people I’ve crossed paths with during that work. All the project stakeholders, and all the junior and mid weight people on the teams. The nice thing about time passing is that people spread out into other organisations and your peers take on senior roles. If you made an effort to build a positive relationship with them, they’re much more likely to hire you.

My fundamental point is that you shouldn’t always chase after the people who are currently holding the purse strings. This may sound obvious but it’s important to maintain relationships with the people you like from your prior clients’ organisations and make sure you meet up with them socially every month or so. One honest friendship is worth a hundred sales meetings.

Know where your new business will come from

If you haven’t got a pipeline of work coming in from direct clients, then you’ll probably end up using a recruitment agency. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but recruiters have their downsides. Firstly, they’re pocketing about 20% of the day rate they’re charging the client, which would otherwise be going to you. Secondly, they have a habit of bending the truth to you about the project and to the client about your skills. The most common horror story about recruiters is that you get mis-sold a project. That wonderful blue-sky vision project turns out to be a wireframe production line role.

If you go to a recruiter and they line you up with a design agency, you now have 2 layers of middlemen sitting in between you and the client. Most London UX agencies charge their clients around £1000 a day. The client sees you as a very expensive resource and if they’re nervous, they’re going to quibble over every hour you bill. This means it can be quite high pressure and stressful in comparison to working for the very same client in a direct relationship.

All that said, there are lots of good reasons to freelance in design agencies. The agency might have an awesome team you get on with, skills and methods that you want to acquire or great projects that you want to be involved with.

To sum up – going freelance is not an easy decision to make. I hope at least now I’ve given you a few things to think about while you’re making up your mind.

]]>http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/07/25/so-you-want-to-be-a-ux-freelancer/feed/0User Experience and Jobs To be Donehttp://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/05/25/user-experience-and-jobs-to-be-done/
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/05/25/user-experience-and-jobs-to-be-done/#commentsSun, 25 May 2014 11:42:40 +0000http://www.90percentofeverything.com/?p=6781Continue reading]]>In the field of UX, we’re all pretty familiar with the concept of behavioural personas, but not everyone is aware of the parallels between this and Clayton Christensen’s “Jobs To Be Done” theory which became famous in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. He explains it quite nicely in this Press Publish interview:

Here I am. I have characteristics that slot me into demographic segments. I just turned 60. I’m 6 feet 8. We just sent our youngest daughter off to Columbia. I have all kinds of characteristics.

But none of these characteristics or attributes have yet caused me to go out and, say, buy the New York Times today. There might be a correlation between particular characteristics and the propensity that I will by the New York Times – but they don’t cause me to buy it.

What causes us to buy something is that a job arises that we need to get done, and we buy or hire a product and pull it into our lives to get that job done.

What’s important is that understanding the customer (as a set of demographic attributes) is the wrong unit of analysis. It’s the job that we need to understand, because the job itself is very stable over time. If you keep focusing on the job, then you can weather through the ebbs and flows of technology as they come into your industry.

I’ll give you an example. Let’s say ‘I need to get this from here to there with perfect certainty, as fast as possible’.

We all find ourselves needing to get this job done on occasion. Actually Julius Caesar had the same job to do, and the only thing he could do to get the job done was hire a horseman and chariot. Now we have Fedex, but the job itself is just the same. The way you get the job done has changed over time.

If you define your business by technology or customers (as demographics), you can get blown out of the water with regularity. And so Western Union would be hired to do this job during the time of Abraham Lincoln. They framed the business as ‘long range telegraph’, and so when the telephone came, Western Union was just blown out of the water. But if you focus on the job, then when new technologies come along you can look at them and say say “holy cow, that would let me do the job even better, so you buy into it in a way that keeps the enterprise going.”

To elaborate, the Jobs To Be Done theory basically says that any company which describes itself as “technology X for demographic segment Y” is eventually doomed. If you tie yourself too closely to a technology, you’ll get blindsided by the next big thing. Similarly, if you define your customers by their demographic attributes, you learn very little about how you can help them better. On the other hand, if you get under the lid of the jobs they are trying to do, and understand their Psychology – i.e. their needs, goals and mental models around these jobs – then you’ve defined the problem in a way that brings the solution into focus, and it isn’t tied to a particular technology or approach.

This is what we’re trained to do in the field of UX, which is why we’re so well placed to have a seat at the product strategy table. As a UX practitioner, it’s easy to let yourself become pigeonholed as someone who just provides a tactical service like wireframing or usability testing. This is disempowering – you should think bigger, even if the people around you aren’t. A theory like Jobs To Be Done can help you bridge the gap from tactical to strategic thinking, and it can help you reframe the way you talk about your role at work.

]]>http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/05/25/user-experience-and-jobs-to-be-done/feed/0Create your own Mac-based usability testing lab with viewing roomhttp://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/01/17/create-your-own-mac-based-usability-testing-lab-with-viewing-room/
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/01/17/create-your-own-mac-based-usability-testing-lab-with-viewing-room/#commentsFri, 17 Jan 2014 13:07:49 +0000http://www.90percentofeverything.com/?p=6762Continue reading]]>I’m currently consulting at The Telegraph where I’ve set up a new usability testing lab for the UX team here (by the way, they’re hiring at the moment). It’s a nice, simple lab set-up and I thought I’d share the details with you.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to usability testing labs. The UX team at The Telegraph is Mac-based, which puts Techsmith’s Morae out of the question. Telestream’s Wirecast would be a decent Mac alternative, but it was really unreliable on the MacBooks I tested it on, putting it out of the picture. After some experimentation, I ended up breaking the problem into two parts: (i) recording and (ii) transmission into a viewing room.

For the recording part of the problem, I ended up going for Screenflow, Reflector and an IPEVO Ziggi-HD USB Document Camera. Screenflow serves to record the screen, in-built webcam and audio from any Macbook. It also runs happily alongside Reflector, so we can wirelessly mirror an iOS device on the Macbook while recording with Screenflow (pictured below).

Finally, if we’re testing using a low power device like a Kindle, or if we want to record our participant doing something non-digital (e.g. paper prototypes or sketching exercises) then we can use the Ziggi-HD document camera. It’s basically just a webcam, but it has fixed focus so the camera doesn’t keep refocusing on the participant’s hands as they do stuff. It’s also mounted on an anglepoise-type stand, making it easy to point at your participant’s device. The bundled app displays the camera’s footage on your desktop, so Screenflow can be used to record it along with the Macbook’s inbuilt webcam. I’m probably going to buy a second Ziggi-HD, remove it from the stand and fix it to a Mr Tappy (or a similar rig) which would allow the participant to move the device around as much as they like while always keeping it in frame.

Moving onto the viewing room part of the problem: VNC, logmein and other screen sharing tools aren’t particularly suitable for this as they can be quite flakey and give a fuzzy picture. This is forgivable if your participant is in a remote location, but it’s silly if they’re just down the corridor. Plus, the last thing a researcher wants is to be interrupted mid-session to be told that the viewing room connection has dropped out. Connecting the viewing room directly to the testing room by dedicated cables seemed like the way to go, but I couldn’t find any gaps under doors or dividers that would allow us to do this. In the end I realised that we had a raised floor, so we could actually run the cables underneath the floor tiles. This is a really useful tip – if your office floor has those flapped boxes in the floor then you probably have a raised floor too. We had our buildings managers take up the floor tiles and put long HDMI cables between two meeting rooms, leaving the terminals poking up out of the floor boxes (If it’s a long distance between the rooms, it’s cheaper to use a CAT-5 HDMI extender).

Rather than trying to do picture-in-picture, we just decided to have two TVs in the viewing room (see above). One of the TVs is used to mirror the test macbook’s screen (above right), the other is used to display footage of the participant’s face, and play the audio of the interview (above left). After looking at a few camcorders, I ended up taking a punt and ordering a GoPro 3 Silver.

It turned out to be a good choice – the quality of the picture is amazing, and the wide angle lens means you get footage of the user’s head, their torso, the device they’re holding, and even the interviewer. It’s worth being aware that the cool-sounding WiFi feature of the GoPro is rubbish for remote viewing. It’s laggy, blury and it can’t be used as the same time as HDMI-out. I’d advise keeping the WiFi turned off and just connecting the device via the micro HDMI port on the side of the camera. It’s surprisingly awkward to mount a go-pro onto a tripod: you’ll need to buy a tripod mount and a frame, then you’ll need to use a small hacksaw to cut a large enough opening for both the HDMI and USB power cables. Still, it doesn’t look too bad when you’re done and since the camera is so small, participants quickly forget it’s there.

So there you have it: a simple and reliable Mac-based usability testing lab that can be used for desktop, mobile and pretty much anything else you can throw at it.

–Interested in working in The Telegraph’s new UX team?
I’m consulting there at the moment. Lovely team, great brand and lots of exciting new things happening right now. Why not pre-empt the job ads – send your CV & portfolio to Tim Goodchild.

]]>http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/01/17/create-your-own-mac-based-usability-testing-lab-with-viewing-room/feed/4Top posts of 2013http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/12/27/top-posts-of-2013/
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/12/27/top-posts-of-2013/#commentsFri, 27 Dec 2013 09:12:06 +0000http://www.90percentofeverything.com/?p=6768Continue reading]]>2013 has been an intense year for me, having left Clearleft in April to start my own business as an independent UX consultant. I’ve got to say, I’ve been loving every minute of it. When you’re running your own business the risk makes everything so much more interesting and exciting. Pitches are more exhilarating, debriefs are more satifying – even the admin work like running your CRM and doing your book-keeping has a certain edge to it. The downside is that I haven’t had much time to blog, something I plan to set right next year. Here’s a round up of the most popular posts from 2013:

The slippery slope.
Just as I thought people were getting fed up with articles on Dark Patterns, I got over 50,000 uniques on this article within 24 hours of posting it. If you’re interested in this subject, do get in touch. We’ve got a team of 5 people working on darkpatterns.org now – myself, Marc Miquel, Jeremy Rosenberg, Joseph Dollar-Smirnov and James Ofer, and we’re looking to grow it this year. It’s a loosely bound collective where we all throw in a few hours here and there to update the site and its content.

The drunkard’s search.
People often only look for what they are searching by looking where it is easiest. Are you making these mistakes in your own work?

Deadly set: how too much focus causes mistakes.
People often don’t talk about the risk of being “too focussed” in our work. It’s actually a documented problem that human factors researchers have to account for when analysing accidents.

This is probably of greatest interest to UK readers, but the sneak into basket dark pattern was featured on BBC Watchdog last week. This dark pattern is going to become illegal in the UK next summer, as our implementation of the EU Consumer Rights Directive (2011) finally comes into action.

Sports Direct, National Express, Skype and Monarch were all singled out as offenders. Sports Direct sneak a mug and/or magazine into your basket when you checkout. Their response was “Following feedback from our customers, we have simplified the process to remove the magazine from an online basket.” Er, here’s a suggestion – how about you stop sneaking stuff into the basket in the first place?

Let’s take a look at how it works today: try ordering something from sportsdirect.com. When you add something to your cart, you’ll see as clear as day that your selected item is the only thing in there. Proceed to checkout and, if you have your wits about you, you’ll see something suddenly has been added to your basket:

To remove it, you need to click “back to bag”, where the sneaked-in item will appear – even though it didn’t before. Finally you can remove it. Phew. If this is simplified, I can barely imagine how complex it must have been before.

Sports Direct go onto elaborate: “Many of our customers are pleased to receive the magazine with its sporting and fitness tips, celebrity interviews and product reviews and advice”. It just goes to show that if a big player like them has the audacity to keep doing this even after being named and shamed on national TV, then the change in the law is not coming a moment too soon.

Design is a branch of applied psychology. If you don’t know the first thing about the psychological foundations of design, then you’re not likely to be a good designer. I’m going to UX Brighton on November 1st, and you should too.

‘Set’ is a survival characteristic we have inherited. The human brain evolved to help individuals live and survive circumstances very different from our own. It predisposes us to select our focus on that part of the picture paramount at the time – a vision often so totally focused that it ignores the rest of the environment.

Once something is identified […] it takes on a reality of its own and sticks in the mind like a burr which is difficult to dislodge. […] The mind becomes tunnelled on a particular course of action. Add to that the ingredient of fatigue and it is not difficult to see that a ‘set’ as hard as concrete can result. Furthermore, ‘set’ is infectious. There is a follow-my-leader syndrome. So it is easy to see why most aircraft accidents are caused by ‘silly’ mistakes in the approach and landing phase.

[…] ‘Set’ has been a factor in many aircraft accidents. [In a case in 1972 over Florida], the crew of a Tristar were not sure that their undercarriage was down. The accident sequence was begun by a burned out light bulb in the system which is designed to show that the undercarriage is down and locked. […] the crew examined every possible of finding the trouble. The flight engineer crawled down into the nose, while the captain and the first officer tried every combination of switches and circuit-breakers. […] the three members of crew did not notice that the autopilot had become disengaged and the aircraft was sinking […] eventually crashing into the Everglades.

Because they had become preoccupied with an unsafe landing-gear indication, they failed to monitor the critical altimeter readings. Ironically, the air traffic controller noticed on his radar that the aircraft was losing height, but instead of pointing this out simply asked diplomatically “How are things coming along there?”.

The crew, still obsessed with their landing-gear problem, assuming he referred to that, for they could thing of nothing else, replied seconds before the crash, “Everything is all right!”

Aircraft accidents make grisly reading, but they are one of the most accurately documented and analysed areas of collaborative behaviour in humans. It’s vital for us to understand how and why we make mistakes – not just in safety critical systems but in all walks of life. When I read that passage above, I see parallels with so many of the mistakes I make on a daily basis at work and at home. I can see myself in every role: the captain, the flight engineer, the first officer, the air traffic controller. You should too.

It’s so disappointing to see the way the field of UX has latched onto Psychological research findings recently. Take cognitive biases for example: instead of seeing our own weaknesses in them, we’ve decided to use them as tools of manipulation for the people we design for. “Only 5 items left; sale ends today; untick this box if you don’t want to receive emails, but tick the next one if you do…” – This sucks.

Intelligence Analysis is another field like Safety Critical Systems design, where bad decisions cost lives. If you pick up a textbook on Intelligence Analysis, the chapter on Cognitive Biases will be written from the perspective of the analyst’s reasoning abilities. Understanding your weaknesses helps you avoid making mistakes in the future.

This is the way we should be thinking about thinking. Let’s analyse ourselves for a change.

Let’s start with a little game. In iOS, there’s an ad tracking feature that allows advertisers to identify you (albeit anonymously). It’s turned on by default. Let’s see if we can work out how to turn it off together. Go into your settings and scroll down.

There we go! Ad tracking must be in “Privacy”, right?

Oh. That’s strange, ad tracking isn’t in the privacy menu – so let’s keep looking. Let’s go back to the main settings page and go into “General”.

“General” is a crappy name for a menu item. It’s basically a bucket of miscellaneous stuff that they didn’t know what to do with. If we tap it, this is what we see:

The first item inside “General” is labelled “About”. Do you think Ad Tracking is in there? It’s a bit of a long shot, but let’s take a look:

Yawn – nothing to see here! But wait, what’s this at the very bottom?

Advertising. Well I never – let’s tap it and see.

We’ve found it! Even better, it says “Limit ad tracking off”. So ad tracking is off already. I’m not being tracked, thank goodness.

But wait a minute. It doesn’t say “Ad tracking – off” it says “Limit ad tracking – off”. So it’s a double negative. It’s not being limited, so when this switch is off, ad tracking is actually on.

Off means on! This is actually a great example of what I define as a Dark Pattern. It’s a user interface that uses manipulative techniques to get users to do things they would not otherwise have done.

The thing about Dark Patterns is that you design them from the exact-same rulebooks that we use to enhance usability. Here’s Nielsen’s ten heuristics, probably one of the most well known set of usability guidelines, created back in the early 1990s.

And here they are inverted!

We can take those three and they pretty much spell out the strategy that Apple used in the example we’ve just seen. One of the things that interests me is the question of why organisations do this sort of thing. I think there are a number of reasons, but the main one is the way targets are set and followed.

To explore this, I’d like you to join me in a little thought experiment. Imagine you’re operations director for an NHS hospital in the UK. Imagine you’ve got three kids and a big mortgage. This job is everything to you. So how would you react when your boss says to you that you have to cut wait times to under 5 minutes per patient or you’re fired. Just think about this for a moment. You’ve got no spare capital, no spare staff time, no way to stretch your resources. How can you possibly do this?

Well here’s a little idea. How about you create a job role for a nurse where their job is simply to say hello to new patients. Nothing more. That way the patients are seen to, that way the wait time problem is solved. You get to keep your job. Sounds devious – but this really happened throughout the NHS in the 90s.

After about 5 years, the NHS realised what they’d done. An NHS spokesperson admitted in the British Medical Journal that: “We shouldn’t just count things that are easily counted – but provide meaningful data about the quality and effectiveness of treatment in the NHS.” So let’s just summarise:

They hit their targets – they did their jobs – and it looked good on paper; but in reality they created a cheaper, nastier experience. In other words, they created a Dark Pattern – just like Apple’s ad tracking UI.

To put it another way, Dark Patterns are often conversion rate optimisation projects that have gone wrong because of an unhealthy working environment. Back in 2010 I became pretty obsessed with black hat UIs so I created this term – Dark Patterns – as a sort of awareness drive – and it worked. I created darkpatterns.org for the community to name and shame the worst offenders. It gets featured in the press every few months, and this creates pressure on the offenders. A few of them have actually been embarrassed into changing their UIs for the better, which is nice.

Now what I could do for the rest of the talk is just walk you through each of the examples on the site. But there’s not much point as you can just go read that on your own time. So instead I’m going to show you some new examples that I’ve gathered together especially for this talk. Let’s start with marketing emails. I’ve chosen this example because I’m certain that most of us here have faced this exact challenge.

Imagine this is part of a website registration form. After the user has entered their email address and a password, we want them to join the mailing list – right?

Well, this particular approach is fairly standard but isn’t hugely effective because users have to take an explicit action to opt in. Chances are they’ll be in a hurry and a proportion of users wont even notice this text – that’s the pink proportion on the left there.

How about this? Mandatory yes / no radio buttons with neither option pre-selected.

This way you’re guaranteed that user will have to make a choice. Everyone has to notice! This seems pretty ethical, doesn’t it. But on the other hand. if we think back to our anti-usability principles, we can use the phenomenon of not noticing to our advantage! How about we design it so that when you don’t notice, you opt in by mistake.

On post-office.co.uk, they do just that. Here, a tick means no. It’s kind of clever because culturally, a tick is an affirmative action.

And they’ll definitely get opt ins from those people who don’t pause to read this stuff. On the one hand this works – they will boost the mailing list opt-in rate – but a certain number of people will realise that the website is pulling a trick and they will swear angrily under their breaths. It’s probably not going to make them drop out just yet, but it is going to tarnish the brand reputation, at least a little bit.

Royalmail.co.uk takes it a step further. Two rows of check boxes, the first is tick to opt out, the second is tick to opt in.

Have you ever heard of a trammel net?

It’s a type of fishing net that is made up of two layers of different types of net. The fish – or your user – can either get caught up by the first layer, or the second layer, or they can get stuck between the two. They’re banned in most kinds of commercial fishing, but it seems you can put them in your UIs without any legal repurcussions.

Here’s another approach which you can find on the Santander corporate banking site.

When you register you’re taken to this long and boring page of Ts&Cs. You can just click “accept” at the top there – the red button. Or, if you want, you can scroll down.

All the way down to section 9. If you’ve got your reading glasses on, you’ll notice that they intend to sell your phone, fax, mobile and address – but that’s OK because you can opt out via this tiny checkbox here.

These solutions are all kind of tiptoing around the problem, though. We could actually take this to another level entirely and get rid of any uncertainty whatsoever. This is how Quora does it:

They don’t mess around with opt ins or questions of any kind. They just opt you in as part of the terms of service. This is what you see when you’re registered – if you take the time to go to the email notifications page.

There are 47 email notifications. You’re automatically opted into most of them.

Here’s another question – imagine you’ve got a large user-base already. What do you do if you want more of them to opt in to email notifications? Well, let me introduce you to the email notification dark pattern. In September 2012, findings.com created a new notification setting – and defaulted all their existing users to “on”.

It’s a fiendishly simple solution. Why even ask when you can just flick the switch for them? Unsurprisingly, some people got pretty annoyed by this and gave them a telling off.

What was great is that they instantly appologised, pulled the feature and described it as a douchebag startup move.

Meanwhile, Twitter is continuing to use this dark pattern and hasn’t issued an appology. These email digests were added a while back:

The thing to take away here is to realise that although it’s easy to play these tricks, they will piss off your users. It’s quite useful to think of your brand’s relationship with your users in human terms.

If Twitter was your other half, a trick like this isn’t that bad. It’s a bit like they farted in bed. It’s gross, it does make you angry but you’ll forgive them for it – at least for now.

If you look at app.net – it’s essentially just a Twitter clone with one unique selling point – the fact that they don’t pull any douchebag start-up moves.

It’s crazy when you think about it – Twitter has actually given them a business model. They’re not a threat yet, but the point still stands.

Okay so let’s move on to another Dark Pattern – Forced Continuity. This is best to explain with an example. This is theladders.com:

Note: All screengrabs of Theladders.com were taken in April 2013.

They are a fairly big US-based job board, founded 9 years ago. They’ve got about 400 employees and roughly $100 million dollars in revenue last year. VC funded too. What I’m about to tell you is quite hard hitting so please do check this yourself and let me know if I’m wrong. Anyway, let’s sign up for free basic membership.

Since I’m signing up for free, there’s no point in reading this stuff, right?

After this I’ll go through a few sign up steps and then I’ll search for a job. Here are my search results. Let’s say the second one down there looks really appealing.

What’s weird is that when I try to select the text, I can’t. This website has disabled text selection with JavaScript. Most users wont give that a second thought, so let’s park that thought for now and click on the job title to get some more information and apply. (Edit: this talk was written in March 2013. It appears that now (July 2013) they are AB testing different versions of the logged-in area. If you register for yourself you may receive a version of the UI that does not include this copy-disabling feature).

I clicked apply a moment ago and I thought I was going to see the job details and the application form. Instead I’m seeing a paywall and it’s telling me that I need to upgrade to apply for this role!

Now what I don’t know right now is that this job ad is freely available on the web elsewhere.

Suddenly disabling text selection makes sense. They want to discourage people from bypassing their paywall by copying the job description and pasting it into Google as a search term. They don’t want people to get to the true source. In this case the job was published on bloomberg’s careers site where you can apply free.

I haven’t taken a large sample, but from a cursory analysis it looks like a fairly large chunk of the listings behind the paywall are available free elsewhere on the web.

Anyway, I was about to naively sign up at the paywall wasn’t I. Let’s go ahead and do that. I’m going to go for a one month subscription, because that’s cheapest, isn’t it?

$25 is pretty cheap as a one of cost, compared to any of these recurring monthly fees, right? But hang on. Take a look at this grey 10 point text on a grey background right at the bottom of the page. It almost looks as if it’s been designed to be overlooked doesn’t it?

And it tells me here that the membership is automatically renewed. So by choosing $25, I’m actually going for the most expensive monthly payment – it’s not the cheapest option at all! Now once I’ve signed up, they somehow neglect to mention auto-renew anywhere prominent.

If I dig into my account settings, then go to the membership page then I’ll finally be able to turn it off – but in reality who’s going to do that? What normal person explores the account settings pages?

So here’s another usability heuristic flipped around. You know how your conversion rate drops in correlation with the number of required form fields? You know how that’s normally really frustrating?

Well, on theladders.com they use it to their advantage. When you click “turn off auto-renew” they don’t give you a confirmation message – they take you to this form.

You have to fill in every single field or your cancellation is not accepted. It’s high friction by design. Very sneaky stuff.

Going back to our metaphor with human relationships – if in the previous example Twitter was just farting in bed. This example is more like having an affair.

Affairs only work while the secret is kept. When the secret comes out, the breakup happens. JustFab.com are using a similar trick:

They are a VC funded ecommerce site. Users think they’re buying an item but they’re signing up for membership at $45 dollars a month. If you go to the terms of service, it explains that you’ll be automatically enrolled in the JustFab VIP membership when you buy an item. Cheeky stuff.

And their users seem to agree with me – apparently they have a class action lawsuit pending. Next.co.uk also does something very similar. On one of the checkout pages it asks you if you want the free next directory.

It even pre-selects the radio button. Sounds OK right – who doesn’t like free stuff? But let’s look at the small print.

Here they explain that by proceeding with the purchase, you’re consenting to a credit check and having a Next.co.uk credit account opened for you. Then they explain that after the first free directory, you’ll be charged for all subsequent directories. Most stores give away free brochures – I did a bit of digging and it turns out that these guys publish four a year and charge you £3.75 each! As you can see, they don’t mention this anywhere at the point of sign-up.

Another related dark pattern is the Roach Motel. It’s where you make it easy to join, and hard to leave. Bank accounts are a great example of this. For example, it’s very easy to open a savings account but it’s a huge pain in the ass to move all your money out of that account and into another, then close the empty account.

Most UK savings accounts come with some sort of bonus period of high interest, which then gets slashed after a year or two. Funnily enough they don’t make much effort to remind you about this.

In other words, they’ve combined “Bait and Switch”, with “Roach Motel”.

According to moneyfacts.co.uk almost half of all UK savers have savings accounts that pay less than 0.5% interest. That’s lower than inflation. We can only guess how many millions are being made by banks in this way. It’s crazy. There are actually services out there that specifically aim to destroy this dark pattern. This is savingschampion.co.uk:

Basically you fill in a form telling them what bank you’re with and what account you have. They’ll then then notify you if your bank ever cuts the interest rates and they’ll tell you what account to switch to. What’s funny is that this simply shouldn’t need to exist – it’s an anti-dark-pattern service!

Finally, here’s the last pattern I’m going to talk to you about: Midirection. Let’s imagine you’ve done a search for “cannot empty clipboard in excel” and you find yourself on experts exchange. This is actually quite an old example but I like it.

It looks like the answer is behind a paywall. In fact it’s just way, way down the page – right at the bottom.

This trick gives them an SEO benefit while simutaneously tricking users into subscribing. They’ve actually been doing this for years – since 2007 in fact. In 2008, stackoverflow was launched. This was their unique selling point:

This is such a good case study showing what can happen if you systematically use Dark Patterns as part of your growth strategy.

Experts Exchange could still be a dominant force today, but they’re not. They got greedy, they used Dark Patterns, everyone got annoyed with them and migrated to a friendlier, more ethical competitor.

When you look at your customers in aggregate, it’s easy to be very detached and impersonal about it. To understand the reality of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of your product, you have to zoom in.

Good design – and good business – is all about empathy with our fellow humans. In fact it’s not really limited to business – it’s society as a whole. It’s what defines us as human. To understand the true impact of your designs, you have to work at a human level of focus. You have to see the whites of their eyes and their facial expressions. That’s really the whole point of this talk.

At the end of the day, you should evaluate what you really want from your customers. Do you just want them to just use your service, or do you want more?

Personally I think usage alone is cheap. A good brand is liked. A great brand is loved and respected. I hope that today I’ve shown you’ll never reach that point if you use Dark Patterns.

]]>http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/07/23/the-slippery-slope/feed/66Are you in a teflon-coated UX role?http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/05/26/are-you-in-a-teflon-coated-ux-role/
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/05/26/are-you-in-a-teflon-coated-ux-role/#commentsSun, 26 May 2013 10:09:07 +0000http://www.90percentofeverything.com/?p=5317Continue reading]]>Maybe you’re a UX researcher, passing choice insights into the product development machine. If what comes out the other side doesn’t seem right, you feel free to bitch and moan. “Didn’t they listen to the findings I gave them?”

Maybe you’re a UX designer who works at the early stages of the design process, doing the discovery phase, running workshops, producing concepts, sketches and setting the vision. Again, it’s so easy to pass the buck and feel vindicated when the quality at the end of the process is low.

Sometimes it feels like you’re a doctor advising a sick patient to give up smoking. If the patient keeps at it and eventually dies, it’s not your fault, right? Working agency-side makes this point of view even easier. You often don’t even see the end result – your agency gets paid and you move on.

Being teflon-coated feels safe, but in reality it’s quite the opposite. You’ll stop improving your skills and sooner or later people will realise you are delivering no value. UX people already have a bad reputation for delivering formulaic rhetoric and not delivering the goods. It’s bad for you, and it’s bad for our industry as a whole.

Fight to make yourself more accountable. Critique, don’t complain. Work out how to fix the process. Remember, design isn’t just UI. Organisations are designed. Workflow processes are designed. You already have the analytical skills needed to make change happen, you just need to step up to the plate.

]]>http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/05/26/are-you-in-a-teflon-coated-ux-role/feed/4Sneaking responsive in under the radar using an mdot site.http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/05/22/sneaking-responsive-in-under-the-radar-using-an-mdot-site/
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/05/22/sneaking-responsive-in-under-the-radar-using-an-mdot-site/#commentsWed, 22 May 2013 08:02:58 +0000http://www.90percentofeverything.com/?p=6514Continue reading]]>Let’s face it, there’s the right way to do design, then there’s the pragmatic way to get things done within your organisation. The two are often not the quite same thing. Let’s say you want to create an elegantly minimal responsive site that focuses on the core UX and privileges the reading experience over ads, cross-links and clutter – but can you achieve it?

In some organisations you’ll have to pry the above-the-fold advertising real estate out of the cold, dead hands of the senior execs. As Leisa Reichelt said a few months ago: “Politics and egos are the main reasons that great design goes awry” […] ‘Show, don’t tell’ is a design principle that seems to work well.”

Some organisations just have too much invested in their full-fat desktop sites. A messy tangle of revenue streams, too many job roles and too many egg shells make disruptive change feel almost impossible.

The mdot site seems like a perfect candidate for bringing in change. It typically doesn’t get much attention as it’s not a great source of revenue. It’s often dated, and the organisation knows “something” needs to be done. This allows you to quietly go about creating a beautiful responsive site. You’re free to streamline the user journeys, ditch all the crap that’s accumulated on the desktop site over the years and do things the right way. It makes sense to start with a focus on smaller viewports, and gradually expand your attention to larger sizes until one day – maybe, just maybe, once the benefits have been proven with your mdot testbed, you can flick the switch and turn off that old desktop site completely.

]]>http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/05/22/sneaking-responsive-in-under-the-radar-using-an-mdot-site/feed/3The drunkard’s searchhttp://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/05/13/the-drunkards-search/
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/05/13/the-drunkards-search/#commentsMon, 13 May 2013 09:36:11 +0000http://www.90percentofeverything.com/?p=6508Continue reading]]>“There is the story of a drunkard, searching under a lamp for his house key, which he dropped some distance away. Asked why he didn’t look where he dropped it, he replied ‘It’s lighter here!’. Much effort […] in behavioural science itself, is vitiated, in my opinion, by the principle of the drunkard’s search” – Abraham Kaplan (1964)

It may be an old story, but it’s something we’re all doing somewhere in our work. The real challenge is finding out where and dealing with it. For example –

Tinkering with the details on a single high traffic page, because that’s what’s easiest with your MVT package (Button colours and labels don’t push the needle far, but it’s so hard not to scratch the itch).

Never going back to challenging design problems because “the decision has already been made”, and instead turning your attention to the new stuff because it’s shinier and more exciting.

Focusing on areas that you’ve already been running research on, on the logic “we’re looking here already, there must be some gold here if we keep trying!”

Looking at just one small area of the site because that’s what the client asked (UX problems are rarely polite and tidy enough to stay within the area originally scoped).

Always reaching for the same research tools (e.g. just analytics), because that’s your comfort zone.

I’ve said this before, but we designers are very good at turning our lens of analysis on others, but we often forget to turn it on ourselves. If you’re doing your current project with the exact same approach your the last one, chances are you’ve missed the opportunity to do something better.

]]>http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/05/13/the-drunkards-search/feed/0Powwowapp: for scheduling researchhttp://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/05/03/powwowapp-for-scheduling-research/
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/05/03/powwowapp-for-scheduling-research/#commentsFri, 03 May 2013 06:56:51 +0000http://www.90percentofeverything.com/?p=6502Continue reading]]>This is neat. Powwowapp is free little app to help you schedule research appointments.

If you work in a UX agency then you’re probably used to paying about £70-£100 a head finders fee for some recruiter to trawl their database and make a few calls. It’s worth it if you’ve got a tough screener spec, but the rest of the time you’ve got to wonder if your cash is being well spent.

With Powwowapp you hook it up to your Google calendar, create your empty slots and you’re given a public facing URL for you to share. People can then pick a slot, book themselves in and give their details, which appear directly in your calendar. The neat thing is that the participants don’t get to see any other entries in the calendar, nor any of the other participant’s details.

I imagine it would work pretty well in combination with a targeted mailshot (if your client has an established user base), a targeted ad campaign, social media or a combination of all of them. It doesn’t give you the ability to pre-screen the participants (i.e. have them fill in a form and prevent them from signing up if they aren’t suitable), but you can achieve that with a bit of Wufoo magic if you need it.

Powwowapp was made by Viget as a side project to scratch their own itch. It is in alpha but it seems pretty solid to me. The real downside is that without a revenue model or any explicit commitment to running it long term, I’d be reluctant to use it on a big client project. With a bit of support from the UX community, I’m sure they might give it some more attention – why not drop them a line to show your support.

I’m going to miss this place. What I’ve loved about Clearleft is that it’s just so different to any other agency I’ve worked at. There’s no company process – everyone’s encouraged to experiment and try different techniques to suit the client’s needs. There’s hardly any internal meetings. I’ve never once had a conversation about my billing efficiency. The focus is on quality, and profitability is almost seen as a by-product. You’re encouraged to share your learnings externally rather than keep them in-house. Everyone’s trusted and given a lot of independence.

I’ve been a UX consultant of some form or other since the early 2000s. Even though I say it myself, I’ve been pretty good at “standard” UX practice for many years. It was working at Clearleft that made me realise that those skills alone are not enough.

Achieving good design for a client takes more than just good design. It’s providing education, therapy and facilitation. It’s about getting a client’s work environment ready so that good ideas have a place to grow and flourish after your project has finished. Your attitude to UX changes when a client hires you to make good UX happen and to see it through, rather than just to turn the handle of a small cog in the machine like user research or prototyping. In Dan Saffer’s Interactions talk last year he joked that UX designers are good at “keeping it vague” and that they focus on the “easy, fun part”. I’m happy that doesn’t apply to me anymore.

So if I’ve got so many good things to say about the company, why am I leaving? It’s simple really. I’ve always wanted to do this – it’s not a sudden change in heart. This is the point in the post that I was expecting to give you a sales pitch and plead “hire me, I’m available!”. In fact since announcing it yesterday afternoon, I’ve already been booked up until July this year
. It’s heartening to know that now I’ve made the jump, the water is warm enough after all. Thanks everyone.

]]>http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/03/21/moving-on/feed/1Is User-Centered Design Broken – or is It Just Us?http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/02/05/is-user-centered-design-broken-or-is-it-just-us/
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/02/05/is-user-centered-design-broken-or-is-it-just-us/#commentsTue, 05 Feb 2013 10:15:00 +0000http://www.90percentofeverything.com/?p=6373Continue reading]]>Cennydd Bowles recently argued on A List Apart that User-Centred Design “may be limiting our field”. I don’t agree, and I didn’t agree with Jared Spool when he said the same thing at IA Summit 2008.

Funnily enough, I agree with many of Cennydd’s and Jared’s individual points, but I disagree with the overall thesis that UCD is past its best. It feels kind of flame-baity to me. Back in the days when Devs used to argue about Agile all the time, Ron Jeffries wrote this this allegory about development processes and baseball. It was a joke about how a group of fictional developers read the rules of baseball, decided to tweak them a little bit and ended up playing a version of it involving a rolled up socks for a ball and very little physical activity, so to make it more efficient. It was easy but they didn’t have any fun, and they posted an angry rant online condeming baseball as “problematic”. Yes, it’s a daft story, but Ron’s point is solid: before denouncing Baseball, Agile, UCD or anything else, it makes sense to stop for a moment and work out if you’re playing it the same way everyone else is.

These days, UCD is seen as a pretty vague process. Everyone makes up their own rules and we all get different mileage out of it. Historically there’s been various efforts to formalize UCD, but most design groups keep it pretty open – you go through iterations of analysis, creation and evaluation; usually trying to involve real users in the evaluation activities. You start with broadbrush concepts and divergent, broadbrush research – then you hone in to detailed concepts and convergent, detail-oriented research. That’s it in a nutshell. It doesn’t somehow spit out innovative products when you turn the handle, but hey – it’s a process, not a fairy godmother.

About a year ago I did some consultancy with an agency who ran about 100 hours of usability testing on a shonky Axure prototype under the name of UCD. It must have cost them about $150k, with barely no difference in the design before or after. They said their client wanted to be extra sure that the design was highly usable, so they added more research – but somehow forgot about the analysis and design bit. There aint no cure for stupidity, but this isn’t the fault of any particular acronym.

Maybe I’m being boring here. I agree there is a lot of bad design happening out there, but does that mean we need to “look beyond” UCD? In fact, I think we should look directly at it. Let’s talk about the common mistakes and the flaws. Let’s evolve it. But please, let’s not coin any new terms just yet.

Which website would you nominate to win an award as the most deceptive, sneaky and manipulative of the last 12 months? I’m very interested in hearing from you, even if you feel it’s already common knowledge – so don’t be scared to nominate Ryanair or Facebook! Just email me your thoughts submissions@darkpatterns.org or post a tweet with the hashtag #darkpatterns and I’ll pick it up.

]]>http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/01/21/dark-patterns-awards-at-sxsw-2013-last-call-for-submissions/feed/0Combining Reflector and Silverback for iOS Usability Testinghttp://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/01/14/combining-reflector-and-silverback-for-ios-usability-testing/
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/01/14/combining-reflector-and-silverback-for-ios-usability-testing/#commentsMon, 14 Jan 2013 16:14:30 +0000http://www.90percentofeverything.com/?p=6310Continue reading]]>If you provide usability testing as a service, it’s pretty standard for your clients to expect video footage to be digitally recorded and piped into a viewing room.

So what do you when you’re usability testing on an iOS device? You can use a kit like Mr Tappy to mount a camera pointed at the screen, but it’s a little awkward and a software solution would be much tidier. This has historically been a blackspot, but recently Reflector has made it possible, along with a couple of hacks that I’ll explain below.

Reflector allows you to mirror iOS devices on your Mac’s screen.

Let’s start off with the viewing room. Reflector turns your Macbook into an Airplay receiver, so you can have the screen of your iOS device appear on your Macbook’s screen as if you were using an AppleTV. It’s simple (instructions here) although it only works on newer iOS devices. To get this footage showing in your viewing room, all you need to do is run a long HDMI cable out of your Macbook (which will be positioned in front of your participant) through into other room, then mirror the screen in System Preferences. Although it’s clunky, it’s reliable: unlike streaming there’s no risk of lag or drop-out. Next you’ll want to get audio and footage of the user’s face. Just stick a DV camera on a tabletop tripod and run an AV cable out of it into a TV in the viewing room. The picture you’ll get from any old DV camera is going to be pretty clear in comparison to a webcam, so it’s worth the effort. If, for some reason, you’re determined to stream it over IP, you could instead try using Wirecast (which looks like an awesome app and I’ll probably be reviewing it soon).

So that’s the viewing room sorted. Next up you want to set up that digital recording of the iOS device’s screen along with the user’s face. Silverback does the trick (disclosure: this is one of our products at Clearleft, where I work). It’s intended for recording your Mac’s desktop. With Reflector running, your Mac’s desktop happens to be showing the iOS device’s screen – so voilÃ , problem solved. Simply position your Macbook so that the built-in webcam is pointed at the participant’s face. There’s a sample video below.

Sample Silverback recording of a Reflector session.

There are two shortcomings you should be aware of. Firstly, you’ll notice in the video footage that you can’t see what gestures the user is doing. In many cases this isn’t a huge problem, but if you really need to see this then you might be better off using something like Mr Tappy to point a camera at the screen. Secondly, Silverback and Reflector have not been designed to work together and they might not be reliable on your machine. Having said that, they run just fine on my Mid-2011 Macbook Air.